https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7j8ge-0cudY
I tell parents, you’ve got children coming to the church and typical of an Orthodox church, it’s highly decorated. You know, there’s icons, various things like that, and I say to them, I believe the human soul cannot be whole without the experience of beauty. But oftentimes in our extremely you know, marketable world, beauty is, you know, we build things for utility, practicality, and you know, here in the suburbanized south, frankly, cities are just, are oftentimes ugly, or areas around them are just ugly. And so I think of our kids, it’s coming into church and for a little oasis of time, in the space of a week, they’re exposed to beauty, and wonder, and things that they can’t get anywhere else. Music even, music that they can sing and participate in. And so what do you think, because we talked about beauty, how do you see, because beauty, you know, especially for someone who’s a, let’s say like a strict materialist or someone who is really focused on kind of scientific thinking, the beauty becomes almost a subjective idea, you know, like what I like is what’s beautiful. But I think what you’re talking about, or what you’re bringing us to, is something which is more, it’s more objective, that there is something about beauty which kind of imposes itself on us, or surprises us, or kind of, you know, or brings us together, and that this notion of beauty, or this aspect of beauty, is something that we almost need, that it’s a human need that we have, something that makes us feel human. Yeah, I mean I think if beauty were purely subjective, there couldn’t be art museums. When people go into art museums, they’re going in to see agreed beauty. Right. And you know, if it was all, you know, just subjective, who would pay to go see something beautiful? It’s something within the modern mind, and some of it has to do with various streams we’ve had in our, you know, sort of philosophical, cultural things, is we’ve lost all confidence in ourselves. That, you know, the notion that beauty is just subjective means that I don’t really believe it’s beautiful, or that my belief that it’s beautiful is very tenuous and ready to be knocked off its feet because it’s merely subjective. And there can’t be any communion with that, because you think it’s only inside you, and part of the experience of beauty, first off, it’s outside you, but then it’s also inside you. It’s an act of communion that you’re reaching out and you you are, you know, engaging with it, and it’s engaging with you, and that’s a very fundamental human experience. The first primary experience of beauty we have as human beings is of the human face. It is, you know, mother and child nursing in normal circumstances, up into recent years, when we were told as mammals that we should not use our mammary glands, like every other animal on planet Earth that’s a mammal. But it’s a face-to-face thing for us. There’s all kinds of psychological studies about the impact of this, that a child is, the mother and child mirror each other’s emotions, and the child has an experience of communion with that. The child smiles, the mother child’s. It’s an affirmation and an experience of that experience of beauty, as they mirror each other. When that’s broken for varieties of reasons, it is just simple fact that the impact is, you know, the negative impact is going to be real, and sometimes, if it’s great enough, can be an impact we experience for all of our lives. That, you know, that the earliest experience of the world is that I cannot have communion with it. It’s very difficult to learn it and to trust it. And so beauty has a sense of wonder. It has a sense, as you described, of order, of hierarchy, of it. I mean, the one thing you can, if you go back to, to say cave paintings, I mean, one of the things that’s most striking about some of the cave paintings in France, for instance, in Spain, they’re amazingly beautiful. Simple, but I mean, just the, I couldn’t do them. I don’t have enough artistic talent to draw animals like that. They’re not stick figures. They’ve got a flow and a form. They draw you in. They have a kind of mystery about them. Despite how primitive they are, they work. They’re beautiful. And no doubt the person painting them thought that, experienced that, and taught the next guy, the next woman, how to do that as well. Yeah. You know, it wasn’t just a cave painter. It was a whole tradition. Of course, of course. But I think there’s something that you said, that you brought up, this idea of the human face, I think is really important, especially in the Christian, the Christian revelation, really then ends up centering on this experience, you know, this kind of immediate experience of the, of the person. And centering beauty and truth. And let’s say this communion in the human face, I think is, is, is extremely important. It also reveals us something very important about, about ourselves, about how we’re connected to, to, to the others. And so we, because in the Orthodox tradition, we do, let’s think everything has come now to flow, especially our notion of beauty is so centered around the icon. We, we kind of are constantly engaged in this relationship of this encounter with a person, this, this idea that you’re looking into a face, which is both a mirror of yourself, but is also completely another person. And so you, you stand, you know, if I, if I, if I look at you, obviously now I’m doing it through a screen, there’s still a little bit left. There’s still a little bit left. You know, I, I have this mysterious encounter of, of, of communion and, and, and that’s, I think that’s really one of the most amazing things that I keep telling people that this idea that Christianity, that God is love, that’s really the central element of Christianity and how all of this connects together, which is this encounter with a person and with persons that also, that reveal how different they are from you, but also reveal how connected they are to you at the same time, this kind of push and pull between, between two people. Well, I think, you know, that’s, it’s precisely the, in an Orthodox understanding, when we talk about God, we’re not really talking about an abstraction, a set of ideas, a set of doctrines or something like that. It’s always grounded. I mean, our notion of, of salvation that is being changed, becoming whole, becoming fully what we ought to be, is most completely expressed in the phrase of beholding him face to face, that this change, Paul says that it be holding Christ face to face for changed from, from glory to glory, that in that sense, we’re being healed and that, which makes it, you are looking outside yourself, but you’re not looking past the human. You’re looking into the face of, of, of love, of, of complete self-giving love in the face of a human being, which we as Christians say is none other than God himself. And so that’s a, and it’s something, as I say, we’ve been doing since the day we were born.